Recommendations of the Editorial team
“I never thought I’d experience this again,” Rush’s Geddy Lee said early on the fourth night of the band’s first tour in 11 years, looking out into the audience at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. With the triumphant conclusion of their Los Angeles residency – with a different setlist every night – they laid the blueprint for the rest of the tour: Apparently the band plans to choose from one of the four setlists in the evenings in the future. As on the second night, Saturday evening also contained all seven parts of “2112” and also brought three previously unplayed songs: “The Pass” from the 1989 album “Presto”, “The Anarchist” from 2012’s “Clockwork Angels” – and, most surprisingly, the first performance of the title track from “A Farewell to Kings” since 1979. A few thoughts on the evening:
After a casual 47-year hiatus from the stage, “A Farewell to Kings” sounded as if it had never been missed. Toward the end of the second set, after an ecstatic “YYZ,” Rush debuted the deepest cut of the entire tour—without any warning. Like the studio version, the track began with Lifeson plucking a delicate intro melody on a nylon-string guitar before exploding into monstrous electric riffs. The band had probably avoided the song for years because the vocal melody starts at the upper limit of Lee’s vocal range – and stays there. But Lee may be the only rock singer of his generation who has actually managed to reverse the vocal aging process. For this tour he has regained some of his old banshee range, apparently thanks to remarkably effective coaching. He seemed audibly comfortable with the song, which he and Lifeson had to create almost from scratch – almost as much as new touring drummer Anika Nilles. The instrumental passage before the final chorus, with Nilles unleashed on Neil Peart’s parts and Lifeson playing solo like his 1970s self, was one of many moments of ghostly resurrection on this tour so far – the essence of Rush, in full, despite the tragic absence of a central third of the band.
A heartfelt version of “The Pass” was another reminder of how deeply Rush’s music – and Peart’s lyrics – can get under your skin. The band has somehow gained a reputation among non-fans for being cold and cerebral – but that’s not the case. “This is one of those songs that goes straight to the heart,” Lee said when announcing “The Pass,” after discussing the evolution of Peart’s writing style over the years — and he wasn’t exaggerating. A significant number of fans have revealed online that the song literally saved their lives with its devastatingly compassionate portrait of a suicidal teenager “standing on a rocky ledge / staring down into a heartless sea.” Lifeson summed up the song’s entire message in his simple, emotionally charged solo.
Nilles as a Rush fan
Anika Nilles has become a Rush fan. The German drum virtuoso wasn’t particularly familiar with the band’s repertoire when Lee and Lifeson first invited her to Toronto to jam together. But over the course of about a year, she took on the seemingly impossible task of not only spending hours learning Peart’s parts, but also internalizing his basic approach. Somewhere along the way, in addition to achieving these goals, she obviously also learned to love the music she plays as much as the audience. She smiles when she nails a particularly tricky Peart fill on “Tom Sawyer” or “Xanadu,” but it’s not all pride and relief: She’s just having fun up there. Peart has had many phases as a drummer, and his polyrhythmic ’80s material can sometimes sound like a completely different player – but compared to Nilles’ previous work, this version is the closest he has to his own natural style. Their performances of “New World Man” and “Distant Early Warning” seemed particularly effortless on Saturday evening.
Rush, who play “The Spirit of Radio,” is and remains the absolute definition of arena rock. When the last vestiges of the classic rock era finally fade, many of the moments that defined its true essence will be difficult to explain to those who missed them. The way Lifeson falls back into the song’s intro riff as Lee sings about invisible radio waves crackling with life, or the moment the lights flicker on as Lee shouts “concert halls” – you had to be there to be there.
The double bill from Rush’s debut album at Encore was a reminder of a path the band didn’t take. With original drummer John Rutsey, the earliest, pre-Progressive, heavily Zeppelin-influenced incarnation of Rush was already great – albeit in a more primal way. Lee’s rollicking, life-affirming “yeah, oh yeah” at the start of Saturday night’s “Finding My Way” over Lifeson’s power chords and galloping riffs was, in its own way, almost as profound as many of the evening’s most philosophical lyrics.
Setlist
Set one
“Xanadu”
“Limelight”
“Subdivisions”
“The Pass”
“Freewill”
“Bravado”
“The Camera Eye”
“The Trees”
“The Anarchist”
“The Spirit of Radio”
Set Two
“2112 Part I: Overture”
“2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx”
“2112 Part III: Discovery”
“2112 Part IV: Presentation”
“2112 Part V: Oracle: The Dream”
“2112 Part VI: Soliloquy”
“2112 Part VII: Grand Finale”
“Far Cry”
“Distant Early Warning”
“New World Man”
“Vital Signs”
“Time Stands Still”
“YYZ”
“A Farewell to Kings”
“The Garden”
“Tom Sawyer”
Encore
“Finding My Way”
“Working Man”